James Cameron explains why he’s so fascinated by bees
James Cameron explains scientific American How is his latest documentary secret of bees Reveals an intimate view inside a beehive
James Cameron is a household name: director of titanic and this Avatar In terms of films, he is one of the most famous filmmakers of all time. However, what most people might not know about Cameron is that he is also a beekeeper.
Cameron runs an organic vegetable farm that includes 300 beehives. Yet for Cameron, his latest documentary project, secret of beesThat was a “revelation,” he says.
“There’s a lot I didn’t know about the bee society.”
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A sound operator recording the sound of bees in the field The mystery of the bees.
National Geographic/Tom Oldridge
The documentary series, which premieres tomorrow on National Geographic and will be available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu on April 1, offers an intimate perspective on beehives preparing to survive the winter. The inner workings of the hive, usually invisible, are revealed: the audience is treated to tender and curious moments, such as a close-up timelapse of a tiny bee larva metamorphosing into an adult bee, and what feels like an Appian version of a Viking funeral – when the bees throw their dead to the ground over the edge of the hive.
“I definitely believed that bees were basically little Roombas that were connected to relatively basic programming,” says Cameron, executive producer of the new series. “But it turns out that when they have it, they’re also able to learn and perform specific tasks.”
A buffalo-tailed bumblebee is moving around with wooden balls in the laboratory.
Scientists, farmers and other bee experts help guide visitors about the behavior of bees. shows a scene a research project Where scientists watch bees landing on colored wooden balls and moving them around without any encouragement – as if they were toys.
“These creatures are a lot like us,” Sammy Ramsey, an entomologist who was a science advisor on the series, said at a press event. “They need the same things we need, even to play.”
Bees are also highly cooperative, working together solve a puzzle in an experiment and making frightening displays to the hives to ward off predators in the wild.
An Asian giant hornet manages to enter the hive of an Asian honey bee.
John Brown, one of the series’ cinematographers, captured the behavior of Japanese bees working to prevent Asian giant hornets from reaching their larvae. The entire demonstration included doing “the bee equivalent of a stadium wave” and using leaf shredders to “clean” hornet scent marks on bee hives so that the predatory insects would be less likely to return.
He says that it was a challenge to bring out these behaviors during filming and that camera rigs needed to be designed to clearly capture the behaviors.
Brown shooting a scene of a fire bee (Oxytrigona tatayara) in a field The mystery of the bees.
National Geographic/Javier Aznar Gonzalez de Rueda
Figuring out how to shoot these scenes allowed Brown to learn how each bee colony, and even individual bees, behave in different ways. He says, “It confirms my understanding that these animals, even within the same species, can have many different types of personalities.”
To achieve this, the cinematographers had to innovate around the limitations of camera technology. Due to the small size of the bees, the depth of field that could be captured by a zoomed-in camera was much shallower than your average photo. This meant that the team worked a fine line of capturing as much detail as they wanted from the creatures, while also trying to keep other aspects of the frame in focus and not disturb them.
“We have some specialist lenses that allow us to get very high magnification and maintain as much depth of field as possible,” says Brown. But “even though our camera technology has evolved significantly over the past decade, the physics has not changed.”
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